Landmine Survivors Network

Overview

Every hour of every day someone steps on a landmine. In one violent instant, victims lose limbs, livelihood and hope. Landmine Survivors Network (LSN) helps the injured in war-torn countries get legs, get jobs, and get on with their lives. LSN is co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mission

Created by and for survivors, LSN empowers individuals affected by landmines to recover from trauma, reclaim their lives and fulfill their rights.

History

LSN was founded by two landmine survivors. While spending his junior year abroad in Israel in 1984, Jerry White went hiking in what turned out to be an unmarked minefield in the Golan Heights. He stepped on a landmine and lost his right foot. In 1993, while working for the International Rescue Committee in Somalia, Ken Rutherford’s jeep hit a mine, and he lost both legs. A decade later, Jerry and Ken met. Traveling around the world to promote the International Mine Ban Treaty, they saw that mine victims were in great need, yet receiving little help. Accompanied by Princess Diana, Ken and Jerry opened the first Landmine Survivors Network office in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1997. Their goal was to create a global network to link survivors to healthcare, rehabilitation, peer support, and social and economic integration. Since 1997, LSN has offered mine victims around the world access to healthcare, prosthetic limbs, jobs, and hope for the future.

Program

LSN assists landmine survivors to fulfill three of their most important needs: health, economic opportunity/employment, and human rights. Each victim is matched with a field worker (another amputee survivor) who links them with the resources they need, while providing counseling and support.

Health: LSN helps ensure that survivors have access to medical care, rehabilitation services, prosthetic and mobility devices, counseling, and medical supplies they need to regain and maintain their health.

Economic Opportunity: LSN helps survivors find jobs or start their own businesses by providing skills training and job placement or small business loans.

Human Rights: LSN teaches survivors to once again become productive and contributing members of their communities by acting as self-advocates for basic rights like healthcare, education, voting, public access, and employment.

LSN now operates seven field offices in Bosnia-Herzegovina, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Jordan, Mozambique, and Vietnam, and has developed programs that reach survivors in 43 of the most mine-affected countries in the world.

Impact

LSN is the first organization created both by and for landmine survivors. Using peer-support, landmine victims become survivors, and in turn help new victims in recovery. This chain of survivorship is what makes LSN unique and successful.

LSN collaborates with over 180 organizations and government agencies in heavily mined countries around the world to improve survivors’ access to help.

To date, LSN has made nearly 100,000 survivor-to-survivor visits to offer counseling to victims of these devastating incidents. In 2006 alone, LSN graduated over 3,600 survivors from our recovery programs, and nearly 1,000 survivors received job assistance from our field staff.

Goals

-Expand cost-sharing programs and access to micro-finance loans to help survivors start and operate their own small businesses.

-Conduct more than 20 rights and advocacy trainings to equip survivors and disability rights leaders to implement the provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and campaign for its ratification around the world.

-Grow existing partnerships in Colombia and in the Middle East, and conduct the research and development activities needed to develop new partnerships in other countries.

-Conduct research and prepare to dramatically expand LSN's geographical reach and pool of survivor beneficiaries over the next few years.